Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ladies and Gentlemen!!!

"We were given the one-drop--it was not our choice. But we took it. Flipped it. Until we were something broad but tight. By another's man hand we were made a race. But by our own, we became a people. That is The Blast--the understanding that you are more than what someone else did to you, that you are more than what socioeconomics makes of you, that you are more than the other side of a Marxist analogy. I have always known this. But it is so easy to forget it out here in this new and necessary world."